"without seeking to know who you are, I recognise in
you an artist."

"An amateur, nothing more, sir. Formerly I loved to collect these
beautiful works created by the hand of man. I sought them greedily,
and ferreted them out indefatigably, and I have been able to bring
together some objects of great value. These are my last souvenirs of
that world which is dead to me. In my eyes, your modern artists are
already old; they have two or three thousand years of existence; I
confound them in my own mind. Masters have no age."

"And these musicians?" said I, pointing out some works of Weber,
Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Herold, Wagner, Auber,
Gounod, and a number of others, scattered over a large model
piano-organ which occupied one of the panels of the drawing-room.

"These musicians," replied Captain Nemo, "are the contemporaries of
Orpheus; for in the memory of the dead all chronological differences
are effaced; and I am dead, Professor; as much dead as those of your
friends who are sleeping six feet under the earth!"

Captain Nemo was silent, and seemed lost in a profound reverie. I
contemplated him with deep interest, analysing in silence the strange
expression of his countenance. Leaning on his elbow against an angle of
a costly mosaic table, he no longer saw me,--he had forgotten my
presence.

I did not disturb this reverie, and continued my observation of the
curiosities which enriched this drawing-room.

Under elegant glass cases, fixed by copper rivets, were classed and
labelled the most precious productions of the sea which had ever been
presented to the eye of a naturalist. My delight as a professor may be
conceived.

The division containing the zoophytes presented the most curious
specimens of the two groups of polypi and echinodermes. In the first
group, the tubipores, were gorgones arranged like a fan, soft sponges
of Syria, ises of the Moluccas, pennatules, an admirable virgularia of
the Norwegian seas, variegated unbellulairae, alcyonariae, a whole
series of madrepores, which my master Milne Edwards has so cleverly
classified, amongst which I remarked some wonderful flabellinae
oculinae of the Island of Bourbon, the "Neptune's car" of the Antilles,
superb varieties of corals--in short, every species of those curious
polypi of which entire islands are formed, which will one day become
continents. Of the echinodermes, remarkable for their coating of
spines, asteri, sea-stars, pa